Frustrations with note reading

I initially started making this game with one student in mind - she was really struggling with learning to read notation and I was trying to think of different ways to help her. At her last lesson I felt like this game was helping, she had got to the point where she was able to play the first level of the game without any mistakes.  

She came for her lesson today and we tried the newest version of the game which now has 3 levels. Again she did the first level without any mistakes but the second level she found hard and as a result she never made it onto the 3^rd level. Before we started the game I explained to her what the second level entailed, that she would hear the note D followed by another note and she needed to work out what that second note was. I showed her how she could use D as the home note and sing up the scale to find out which was the mystery note but she didn’t seem to understand – or didn’t seem to want to understand! She refused to sing with me so I sang for her, but even then she often chose the wrong answer. She was obviously frustrated and after playing the game 3 times she had had enough. 

When I asked her if she had tried the 'play at home game' whilst I had been away she said that she couldn't get it to work on her computer. I showed her again how to get to it and asked her if she wanted to have a go now. She started playing and then something strange happened and the timer got stuck so the game became never ending! This game only has one level - the one she is now confident in and she got so excited seeing her score go up and up. Once she got to 100 points I had to stop her playing so we could get on with the rest of the lesson. She would have carried on forever otherwise! All previous frustrations had been forgotten.

But when we got onto playing the violin she seemed again to have totally forgotten how to read the notation despite having got 100 points without any mistakes playing the game just a few minutes before. When I asked her why she could recognise the notes when playing the game but not when playing violin she said, ‘on the game the letter comes up on the screen and then I can look down at the notes and find it, but in this music there are no letters.’ I don’t really understand what is going on in her mind but I wonder if the problem is that whilst she is playing the game the notes are in scale order but in a piece of music they are not and so she finds it harder to recognise them. Perhaps I need to get her to play the game with the tin foil notes rearranged into a random order and see if she can still recognise them. Having said this, after the initial struggle to get her to read the music she 'suddenly' remembered and by the end of the lesson managed to play from the music without any help. This often happens and I can't work out if she is lazy, hoping that I will just tell her what to do if she says she can't read the notes, or if she really doesn't understand.